This seems related to BABEL: Unknown option: base.Children, but the fixes provided there don't help my situation. Two days ago I had an Electron application that ran in development mode (via 'electron-forge start') and as a packaged application (starting the executable in the folder produced by 'electron-forge package'). The app continues to run in development, and it will execute in production, but Babel produces an error in the Web console:
Unknown option: base.Children. Check out http://...
This occurs on the first require statement calling for one of my JSX files (there's another thing: react-forge doesn't transpile the JSX, and I suspect I'm about to be told to RTFM over that matter). I can get the same error to pop up whenever I want; all I have to do is enter "require('somefile.jsx')" in the console, and it'll do the same thing. Investigation of the error reveals that the options manager's mergeOptions function is passed a copy of React at one point during the loop that's supposed to incorporate the presets and plugins. Again, this did not start happening after a change to the application code; I tried to update some packages in NPM, and the next build I did produced this error.
I've wiped the node_modules directory completely and run a fresh 'npm install' followed by 'electron-rebuild' and a repackaging of the app produces the same results. I've tried incorporating the .babelrc contents in package.json according to the docs at the Babel website. Again, dev works fine and production fails. Creating a compliant .compilerc produced similarly disparate results. How is my production app getting a React component where it should have the Babel options?